Robin Hood

In Shakespeare's As You Like It a banished Duke takes refuge in the Forest of Arden: "... and many merry men with him, and there they live like old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world." Already, here, Robin's world is arcadian. Shakespeare never wrote a play about Robin Hood. Ben Jonson began one but did not finish it. There are several short 'May Games' plays enacting the deeds of Robin and his associates, but in these he has been transformed into a mythological  'Green Man', or 'Robin Goodfellow' figure for the games. In that sense perhaps Shakespeare did write a Robin Hood play in Midsummer Night's Dream. Some think these later dramatic pieces take Robin back to his origins as a forest god. Perhaps. But the Robin Hood of the earliest surviving ballads has neither an arcadian nor a mythological aura about him; rather he functions as a contemporary hero.

Langland captured the  sense of him from the  point of view in the fourteenth century with the character Sloth who cannot recite his pater noster "but can rymes of Robyn Hode". This early Robin Hood was not the dispossessed aristocrat that I grew up with watching the TV series. That idea came from Anthony Munday another late playwright who made him the Earl of Huntingdon. Robin in the ballads is quite specifically a yeoman. Not part of the Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Normans but a plain outlaw. Inhabiting in most of the ballads Barnsedale in Yorkshire rather than Sherwood. Devoted to the Virgin Mary he nevertheless persecutes the monks of the powerful  St Mary's Abbey in York. He lives in the reign of one of the Edwards rather than Richard I or John. And there is no Maid Marian or Friar Tuck until much later. 

But when these ballads were written he was very much of 'now' rather than an ideal past:

All nyght lay the proude sherif

In his breche and his schert

No wonder it was in grene wode

Though his sydes gan to smerte.

'Make glade chere' sayde Robyn Hode

'Sheref for charite!

For this is our ordre i wys

Under the grene wode tree'.

'This is a harder order' sayde the sheref

'Than any ankir or frere;

For all the golde in mery Englonde

I wolde nat longe dwell her'.

It was a hard life and is represented as such and the outlaws are desperate men. But by the sixteenth century we see Henry VIII dressing up as Robin with his courtiers in Lincoln Green. Or Peele, in his  Edward I , can make Llywelyn and Eleanor de Montfort play Robin Hood Games in the Welsh mountains as a 'comic relief' scene to pad out the play with a lecherous Welsh friar in place of Tuck. As for the jolly friar, by the time he came into things it was all good fun in the Greenwood. One 'May Games' play ends like this as Tuck wins a mock combat and so the 'Marian':

Here is an huckle duckle

An inch above the buckle.

She's a trul of trust,

To serve a frier in his lust,

A pryckster, a prauncer, a terer of shetes,

A wagger of ballockes when other men slepes.

Go home ye knaves and lay crabbes in the fyre

For my lady and I will daunce in the myre for veri pure ioye.

 *****

{The above is miscellaneous material at a tangent to the longer Robin Hood piece I'm preparing} 

EX MARIA VIRGINE

Following my comments on Vernon Watkins I found - co-incidentally - that I had in my stocking this year the above CD of John Tavener's Ex Maria Virgine which includes a setting of Vernon Watkin's 'Birthday Sleep'. My attention has also been drawn to Mary recently in my reading of the early Robin Hood ballads in preparation for a talk  {details HERE} In spite of the anti-clericalism expressed by Robin and his men in the ballads, there is a strong devotional attachment to Mary. In some cases this is expressed in fairly conventional terms and reflects the strength of the cult of Mary at this time. But there are also some apparently unorthodox aspects in the presentation of Mary as patron of the Outlaws that seem to me to have more to do with the sort of relationship one expects to find between a pre-christian goddess and her favoured followers. Certainly a monk from St Mary's Abbey kidnapped by Robin's men  is dumbfounded by the suggestion that he comes to them on Her behalf.

So I'm currently following this up. Having consulted standard pious sources such as the Catholic Encyclopaedia, I've also located a second-hand copy of Marina Warner's Alone of All her Sex , a book which I knew of but neglected to read when it was in print. But if anyone knows of other sources I should be consulting, I'd be glad to hear of them.   Meanwhile .... Back to John  Tavener.

Vernon Watkins

Vernon Watkins is a much neglected poet. Living most of his life in Swansea where he worked quietly, in marked contrast to his friend Dylan Thomas, his seven collections of poems from Faber between The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd (1941) and Fidelities (1968) represent a lifetime of dedication to poetry as a craft. His highly formal style and neo-platonic themes made him an unfashionable voice as he grew older but he never deviated from the view that a poet’s only concern should be “with metaphysical truth”. His exploration of that truth through, for instance, his ‘Music of Colours …’ sequence which explores themes of Light and Dark, was conducted with an intensity that made no concessions to popular taste. He sought, beneath the colours of the world, a purity of whiteness: “O but how white is white, white from shadows come,/ Sailing white of clouds, not seen before/ On any snowfield, any shore;”. But Light and Dark always interact: the white swan, Jupiter, in ravishing Leda, is “ … a great down/ Of thundering light” but “The mound of dust is nearer, white of mute dust that dies/ In the soundfall’s great light, the music in the eyes,/ Transfiguring whiteness into shadows gone,/ Utterly secret. I know you, black swan.”

His poetic mentor was Yeats and he sought to parallel the Irish poet’s use of native material in his own re-working of Welsh themes. He believed that “rhythm and cadence are born in the blood” and that this made him a Welsh poet. His re-working of the Taliesin theme in ‘Taliesin and the Spring of Vision’ represents the poet as one who receives inspiration from the Muse and is able to transcend Time but who must “adapt … to the limitations of time” in order to communicate with others. He corresponded with friends like the artist Ceri Richards and the writer and artist David Jones about these things and referred to these and other artistic associates in his poem ‘The Forge of the Solstice’. Here are the two final stanzas of that poem:

And out of it now falls the winter sun,
Leaving a ceaseless myth of moving waves,
Till darkness quiets all things. Man is one:
The identity survives its many graves.
First was the hunter, then the prophet; last,
The artificer, compounding in one ghost

Hunter and prey, prophet and witness, brought
Into that circle where all riddles end.
Love gives their art a body in which thought
Draws, not from time but wisdom, till it bend
The solstice like a bow, and bring time round
White with young stars, quick from the forge they have found.



Selections of Vernon Watkins poems are available from Golgonooza Press and from Carcanet (with an introduction by Rowan Williams)

IN ARDEN

"This is the forest of Arden ..."

Arden is not Eden, but Eden's rhyme

Time spent in Arden is time at risk

And place, also: for Arden lies under threat:

Ownership will get what it can for Arden's trees:

No acreage of green-belt complacencies

Can keep Macadam out: Eden lies guarded:

Pardonable Adam, denied its gate,

Walks the grass in a less-than-Eden light

And whiteness that shines from a stone burns with his fate:

Sun is tautening the field's edge shadowline

Along the woods beyond: but the contraries

Of this place are contrarily unclear:

A haze beats back the summer sheen

Into a chiaroscuro of the heat:

The down on the seeded grass that beards

Each rise where it meets with sky,

Ripples a gentle fume: a fine

Incense, smelling of hay smokes by:

Adam in Arden tastes its replenishings:

Through its dense heats the depths of Arden's springs

Convey echoic waters - voices

Of the place that rises through this place

Overflowing, as it brims its surfaces

In runes and hidden rhymes, in chords and keys

Where Adam, Eden, Arden run together

And time itself must beat to the cadence of this river.

Charles Tomlinson

I love the interplay of 'contraries' and echoes of otherness (Arden as Eden's rhyme) the assonantal edginess of not-quite chiming words (consider 'Adam ... macadam'). The sheer density of description achieved here while also holding the sensuousness of it at arms length ('In runes and hidden rhymes ...'). Tomlinson looks at Eden and realises he is not there. And yet ...

The ELEGY for Llywelyn

Following the discussion in the previous entry about David Jones’ inscription commemorating the death of Llywelyn in 1282, here is my translation of the Elegy for Llywelyn written by his court bard Gruffudd ap yr Ynad Coch . Some people in Wales still wear an ivy leaf to remember this occasion on 11th December each year. People also gather annually at the memorial stone (above) at Cilmeri near Llanfair ym Muallt (Builth Wells) where he was killed. There are good line-by-line translations of the Elegy, notably Gwyn Williams’ parallel text (Welsh facing English) in The Burning Tree (Faber 1956 - not currently in print) and Tony Conran in Welsh Verse- see here: http://www.gwales.com/bibliographic/?isbn=9781854110817


My free translation - revisted now from 20 years ago - does not follow the original line by line but does remain true to the narrative development in spite of contracting many lines from two or three to one and slightly altering the exact order of the lines in places. Although I worked closely from the original when I did the translation, looking at it now with the benefit of hindsight there are some things that I could have done differently. I tried to produce a readable and accessible version of the poem which conveys something of the power as well as the narrative of the original. So I concentrated on creating something that worked in English. The poem opens like this:

Oer gallon dan vron o vraw allwynin
(Cold heart under breast of fear sad)

am vrenin, derwin ddôr, Aberffraw
(For a king, oak door, Aberffraw)

Gwyn Williams renders the final “allwynin” as “pitiful”. Tony Conran uses “grieved” and maintains the use of the dash between ‘vraw’ and ‘allwynin’(a device used in some Welsh editions of the text to maintain the end-rhyme “-aw” which occurs throughout the poem). I abandoned the word together with the literal rendering of the king as the oak door for the idea of the heart of oak lying cold behind the door, though keeping the idea ‘strength is vanquished’. The “cold heart” reference also occurs later in the poem:

Oeruelawc callon dan vronn o vraw
(cold heart under a breast of fear)

rewydd val crinwyd yssyn crinaw
(lustiness like dried sticks which have shrivelled)

Pony welwch chwi hynt y gwynt a’r glaw?
(do you not see the course of the wind and the rain)

Pony welwch chwi’r deri yn ymdaraw?
(do you not see the oaks clashing?)

Pony welwch chwi’r môr yn merwinaw yr tir?
(do you not sea the sea irritating the land?)

Here the translation of the word ‘merwinaw’ was an issue. The dictionary gives this is meaning ‘grate (on)’, ‘cause pain to’ or ‘itch’. “Stinging” is chosen by both Tony Conran and Gwyn Williams while I preferred “scouring”. But it is the series of lines that begin with the phrase “Pony welwch chwi …” and other sections of the poem where repetition of a phrase is employed for several consecutive lines, that now seems significantly absent in my version. I chose instead to force it onto to a culminating “Do you not see?” in order to use English rhymes to emphasise the main verbs and used some repetition elsewhere to convey the effect. While a direct translation would have to replicate this, the attempt to create a new version has to make its own decisions about what works in the new language. Any translation is a matter of balance but the balance here is more towards what I felt worked in English than providing an exact but possibly awkward version of the Welsh. There is, for example, another section where the word ‘arglwydd’ (lord) is the first word for several lines, sometime followed by an adjective which would have to come first in English. I also departed from the first person singular of Gruffudd’s original after the first stanza to convey the wider social gloom which overtook the Welsh followers of Llywelyn at this time. The event signalled the end of Wales as an independent nation and preceded a period of intense castle building by Edward I who had his son invested as Prince of Wales in the newly built castle at Caernarfon.


*

The heart of oak is cold
behind the gates of Aberffraw.
The hand that gave gold
is still now – I cannot wear it,
the apparel he put about me.
This grief for my lord is a cloud on my soul
This grief for the fate that his wounds brought us
confounds the red spear of Cadwalader’s keeping.

For us now the darkness,
the hatred of Saxons
A time of lamenting
in the life left to us
A time now to praise him
to think of his glory
to reproach even God
who has left us without him;
For him life eternal.

What now for us left
with a full load of weeping?
The dark hand that felled him
haunts his kingdom; his hall now the grave.
A long vista of fear stretches before us.

Lord Christ deliver him
for the sake of our sorrow,
Heavy the sword blows that struck him to earth
Heir of brave princes, his flame
burned brightly: strong Lion of Gwynedd
Great was the need of the strength of his throne
All Britain was struck down with Nantcoel’s defender.

Tears running on maiden’s cheeks
Blood flowing from warriors gashes
and trodden into the mire of our land.
Widows keening with hearts broken
and sons without fathers, their homes
-charred ruins – fired and looted.
Not since Camlann has there been such weeping
Gone is our mainstay, his golden hair
stained with a death blow O Llywelyn!
My mind cannot grasp it.

Hearts chilled by a pall of fear
Our life-will withers like weeds in Winter
as the wind dashes the rains upon us
and the oaks clash
and the sea’s crash scours the land:
Do you not see?
The Sun falls and the stars are shrinking!
Can you not believe our world is ending?
O God, why does the sea not rush over the shore?
Why should this life trouble us more?
Wretched we are and clasped in fear
with no-where to turn and terror’s grip tightening
and only life’s shackles to loosen our burden.

All his followers now cast down,
his lords and his servants,
the weak and the strong, all of us suffer
Why should we value a head on our shoulders
when he is without one?

His head has fallen and with it our pride
Fear and surrender are all we have left
His head has fallen – a dragon’s head
Noble it was , fierce to our foes
His head is stuck with an iron pole
The searing pain of it runs through my soul,
This land is empty – our spirit cut down.
His head had honour in nine hundred lands
Proud king, swift hawk, fierce wolf
True Lord of Aberffraw
His only refuge

the Kingdom of Heaven.

First published in AGENDA (Vol 26, No. 3) and reprinted together with the original and the translations of Gwyn Williams and Tony Conran in Materion Dwyieithog/Bilingual Matters (1989).